A number of good ideas and a new technology or two have crossed my desk lately in no particular order. So rather than wait for them to magically assemble themselves into a single-topic column, I've decided to present them here in the same manner that they arrived: in no particular order.

Following FDA’s recent push to monitor health claims on functional foods, this proposal calls for full disclosure of ingredients, reporting of adverse health effects and random testing for pathogens or contaminants.